It’s in the government’s best interests to have a climate Budget. It may not care about the planet – but the people do

This government is known for its aversion to expert advice, and its enthusiasm for “weirdos and misfits” to frame public policy, but it would do well to heed the advice of its own advisory Committee on Climate Change, comprising leading scientists in the field. This was set up by the Climate Change Act 2008 – in a world first for Britain – and is chaired by a Conservative peer, John Selwyn Gummer, the former environment secretary. Of course, none of the aforementioned would recommend it to the self-styled disrupters and mavericks now running the country, but even they might have to admit that the climate emergency is already upon us, and perhaps some urgency about dealing with it is now appropriate.

The committee’s deputy chair, Baroness Brown, has called for a “climate Budget” in March. As it happens, she may have some luck with Sajid Javid, who has recently at least paid lip service to the notion of saving life on Earth. Mr Javid has promised that his 11 March Budget will “prioritise the environment”, and indicated that a programme of £100bn for future projects (albeit not all of them necessarily green) will be unveiled.

It is difficult, however, to see Mr Javid taking the crisis sufficiently seriously to announce all of the necessary radical changes – and action is needed now. The government has a target of a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. That, one of Theresa May’s few abiding achievements, was also a global first. It sounds far away, but it is already looking to be in jeopardy through lack of action.

Baroness Brown, better known perhaps as Julia King, warns: “We are not on track to meet existing legal targets for the 2020s and 2030s – and now we have raised the bar.”

If the government is to have much chance of hitting its own, admittedly demanding, targets, the 2020 “Climate Budget” will have to include measures that will cut carbon emissions – such as ending sales of petrol and diesel cars and removing gas boilers from homes and commercial buildings by, say, 2030 or 2035. This will entail considerable cost to the private and public sectors, depending on the degree to which the changes are to be directed by bans on certain technologies, or encouraged via taxes or subsidies.

Thus, for example, the switch to pure electric vehicles – battery powered alone rather than hybrids, also equipped with an internal combustion engine – could, in theory, be achieved with massive subsidies to new car buyers, taxes on petrol and diesel engines, a ban on cars emitting more than a certain percentage of CO2 per kilometre, or a combination of these and similar measures.

Of course, the car makers may not be able to produce all the vehicles required – so they, too, may need industrial subsidies to help decarbonise their product ranges. (It might prove one way to preserve car making in the UK, post-Brexit.) Changes to fuel duty and vehicle excise duty in the Budget might be one early signal to the automotive trade and motorists alike about the government’s intentions in this area. Indeed, given the long-running and damaging uncertainty about official intentions towards diesel, such clarity would be welcome to manufacturers and retailers as much as to the car-buying public. The same applies to the growing number of sometimes arbitrary local bans on diesel vehicles.

Mr Javid could also point the way on the present under-taxation of air fuel and travel, made all the more pressing and difficult with the recent rescue of Flybe. The ban on fracking could be usefully re-affirmed; and the government could also ensure that “exported” CO2 emissions (such as when manufacturing switches to China from Britain) are also accounted for in the statistics; and the chancellor might work with colleagues to announce that planning rules on windmills and solar panels are relaxed.

The replacement of natural gas-burning central heating systems with alternatives such as heat pumps is another huge shift that requires a medium-to-long-term policy framework from government. Householders cannot be realistically expected to make such an investment for long if they cannot know what the parameters for the price of fuel will be. They also need some certainty about the generosity of any grants to make the switch to carbon-neutral heating. Politically, ordering householders simply to scrap their gas boilers and instal an unfamiliar new technology to heat their homes and take a shower is simply impossible.

A national programme for state-of-the-art insulation for homes and other buildings is also something that cannot be simply mandated by central government, forcing individuals and companies to comply. There is much the Treasury can do to encourage warmer homes. And how about installing a reliable structure for charging all the electric vehicles we are planning for? Though it might be a futile thing to suggest, Mr Javid and the Treasury could do worse than adopt some of the better of the imaginative proposals in Labour’s Green New Deal. There is, after all, no monopoly on good ideas, even if their provenance is not ideal.

And yet ministers say that they will not even decide how to fund a strategy to meet their legal commitments until the end of the year. Mr Javid should take the lead, make the most of the opportunity and take some early bold, symbolic steps and a greener direction of travel.

As with social care, the state pension and other areas of policy that can only be resolved through mechanisms that will apply far into the second half of the 21st century (and which demand action now), the best way forward would be via lasting cross-party consensus. On this, there are few encouraging signs. Indeed, long before the Brexit trauma poisoned the national political culture, the parties always put immediate political advantage before the longer-term national interest when challenged to agree on the care crisis. The climate crisis is trapped in the same way.

In November, Mr Javid and his colleagues will have to face the world when they host the UN COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow – it would hardly do for the UK to be seen to be reluctant to make the sacrifices needed to help save the planet. Public opinion, too, is rapidly moving on the issue. For a government mainly driven by populism, that is the best possible motive for going green. The Budget on 11 March is a fine time to start.